Jan Ozer: We've been doing live streaming for a while, and new platforms have opened up that made it really attractive to want to distribute to multiple platforms at the same time. You might use a service like Livestream, but you still want to go out to Twitter, you still want to go out to Facebook Live, you still want to go out to YouTube Live, and what we're going to discuss today are ways you can do that.

Our first category are hardware devices that stream directly to one or more services, and we're going to talk about two products, the Matrox Monarch HDX, and the Teradek T-RAX. Starting with the Matrox Monarch, I did a review of that product that's available here.

And here's what it looks like from an I/O perspective, and what you see is that you've got two separate inputs for both HDSDI and HDMI on the back, and you've also got two ethernet connectors if you want to do that as well. On the front you see some USB ports, and those USB ports are for local storage, that can be any kind of USB hard drive. You also see an SD card slot, so you can record video in the SD slot, while you're producing your video, streaming out the ethernet port.

So you've got two encoders in this product, and you can use it in a couple different ways. If you want to stream to two different services, you can stream to two different services. If you want to record one version locally, you can use that input, store that locally to the SD card, and then stream the other one, so you can share the input that way. So it's a pretty flexible product, if you want to do one at three megabits a second to go out to YouTube Live, and you want to do one at 10Mbps for your own internal network, you can do that as well.

Why do you want to use an appliance rather than a cloud service? We're going to be discussing cloud services towards the end of the presentation. And they talk about some of the primary use cases. You can stream primary back-up server destinations for redundancy. That's nice. You can stream locally at a high bit rate, and send a lower quality stream to your CDN. That's also nice. Obviously, you can stream to different services. That's why we're here.

What key features differentiate your product from others in the same category? Two independent encoders, so there's not a lot of hardware devices in the $2000 price range that have two separate encoding capabilities. It also has a nice feature, SDI power loss, so if something happens to the unit, the SDI signal would be routed through the box. It'll go out the other side, and you can continue to use the signal with another encoder. And then, it also has closed caption capability if that's important for you. And the hardware, as I said, costs about $2000.

Matrox does a very good job with their marketing, and they've got some case studies, if you're interested in understanding how companies or other organizations are using these, you can check out the case studies here.

The Monarch HDX is well featured, easy to use, and reasonably priced, and produced very good quality output. Those seeking a dual-channel hardware encoder should definitely include the product on their short list.